Michael has died. Another friend is gone. Sunday, we bid our farewells to him at a memorial service in the open air on the grounds of one of the colleges where Michael once taught. Students, colleagues, mentors and friends gathered together and did what the living do when a friend dies: We shared with one another our stories about spending time in Michael's company. We ate; we drank; we laughed; we cried. Together, we remembered what it was like for us, uniquely, to be with Michael. It occurs to me just now that perhaps this is how we make our friends immortal. All those individual stories become part of a collective memory that we can later dip into when thinking of our friend. Michael, then, becomes more than he ever was to any one of us, which just maybe helps us to see more of who he was to us all. Like Edward Bloom in the movie Big Fish, who becomes at his death the mythical creature he believed he was--larger than his one life, in other words--Michael exists now in our lives as his own brand of legend, someone who lived his life alongside of ours for a time, and will endure forever as the product of an essential labor.
I cannot think of a better way to describe a life--the product of an essential labor--because it honors everyone and everything that happens to us. Leave it to a funeral director to come up with it. I found the line in a recent article in the LA Times entitled "A new American way of death"(Sunday, September 1), and I have adopted it as I have adopted the lines of so many other writers and poets who have bothered to share their musings with the rest of us. In this case, writer and funeral director Thomas Lynch wrote in his article that a good funeral is "the product of an essential labor, begun at birth, worked out through life, finished in death." I like this as a universal epitaph, or a work ethic or an ethical way to look at living or loving or committing ourselves to endeavors we deem worthwhile while we're here. In other words, our laboring here is essential. It all matters, and it matters to us all. It leaves tracks. Our sorrows and our joys, our trials and our triumphs, they all contribute to the "product" we become.
At the end of a recent yoga practice, our teacher sent us home with a reminder from one of the Dalai Lama's many teachings: "Everyday, go somewhere you have never been." Our teacher suggested that we take this lesson and apply it to our yoga practice. She encouraged us to use the Dalai Lama's words as a reminder to go deeper into our practice, to go to the place in our practice that we have not allowed ourselves to go, to go beyond the place we allow ourselves to believe we can go. I thought a lot about this lesson 1. not just because the Dalai Lama said it, and 2. not just because what he says often makes me think a lot. Due to a recent injury I had to heed, I had been away from my practice for a week. It occurred to me that being injured is somewhere I do not choose to go nor do I like being forced by an injury to take a week off from my practice.
What about my essential labor? Going to the place of injury, well, it messes with my ego. In that place where I am injured, where I am asked to pause and to rest and to consider other aspects of my yoga practice, I am not the person I believe myself to be when I am practicing regularly. Attachment, I see, is real even when it concerns my attachment to practice. When Sri K. Pattabhi Jois was asked by one of his students about pain and injury and one's yoga practice, Jois wisely answered like any zen master or astute teacher interested in the growth of her students: "Pain is real." Enough said. And just as we are instructed to follow our breath in our yoga practice, to really understand that the asanas are merely a distraction from the breath--a trick, in other words, to get us caught in the ego--we understand, and sometimes the hard way, that we cannot ignore what is real. The path through injury is unique to each practitioner because our injuries, like our pain, hold an individual lesson for our unique benefit. It is not necessarily wise to follow the advice of another when face-to-face with our own brand of pain. My friend, Michael, in the end, had to face his own moment of surrender alone, to release his final breath, which would signal the end to his essential labor here. I imagine that at some level that release, that final letting go, is painfully bittersweet.
The other night, I watched a documentary about the tennis star and activist Billie Jean King who famously beat Bobby Riggs in a tennis match played in 1973 and billed as a battle of the sexes. For Riggs, that match was the game of a chauvanist; for King, the match stood for something so much larger than herself. For King, a win meant everything for the future of women who wanted to compete and be taken seriously, which meant the opportunity to earn equitable compensation, in tennis and other sports. In the final moments of the match, King talks about how she knew she had to finish the game; she could not think about having to go the distance and play five games. In that moment she said the most amazing thing. I thought it was amazing. She said that it is so hard to finish something. This from a champion, someone who trained both her body and her mind to compete and to win. This admission of King's made me think of Michael's recent passing, and the death of my father and many other friends and relatives who have had to release that final breath, who had to put an end to the product they labored on their entire lives by ultimately surrendering, and to something so unknown. How brave it is to finish, I think.
"Pain is real," counsels Pattabhi Jois. The remedy for me, once again, patience and listening more--endless journeys, too.
David Garrigues insists that injury is an opportunity for digging "deep into the heart of yoga," a quick reminder to me that there are eight limbs on this journey--perhaps not unlike the Bible's reference to "the many mansions of My Father's house." Garrigues is the founder of Ashtanga Yoga School of Philadelphia and one of the original disciples of Jois in the West. On a recent visit to his website, I discovered the following about ujjayi breath--the victorious breath at the heart of our yoga practice and that thread we are meant to learn to follow without distraction even when injured. An unattributed quote notes that ujjayi is "the noise of resurrection." Et voila! I think. There it is! The product of an essential labor: This is the noise of resurrection. My breath transformed by the rhythm of ujjayi. The breath of all souls transformed. Here is a place I recognize as home, and somewhere altogether new, another mansion in the house where I have never been.
I cannot think of a better way to describe a life--the product of an essential labor--because it honors everyone and everything that happens to us. Leave it to a funeral director to come up with it. I found the line in a recent article in the LA Times entitled "A new American way of death"(Sunday, September 1), and I have adopted it as I have adopted the lines of so many other writers and poets who have bothered to share their musings with the rest of us. In this case, writer and funeral director Thomas Lynch wrote in his article that a good funeral is "the product of an essential labor, begun at birth, worked out through life, finished in death." I like this as a universal epitaph, or a work ethic or an ethical way to look at living or loving or committing ourselves to endeavors we deem worthwhile while we're here. In other words, our laboring here is essential. It all matters, and it matters to us all. It leaves tracks. Our sorrows and our joys, our trials and our triumphs, they all contribute to the "product" we become.
At the end of a recent yoga practice, our teacher sent us home with a reminder from one of the Dalai Lama's many teachings: "Everyday, go somewhere you have never been." Our teacher suggested that we take this lesson and apply it to our yoga practice. She encouraged us to use the Dalai Lama's words as a reminder to go deeper into our practice, to go to the place in our practice that we have not allowed ourselves to go, to go beyond the place we allow ourselves to believe we can go. I thought a lot about this lesson 1. not just because the Dalai Lama said it, and 2. not just because what he says often makes me think a lot. Due to a recent injury I had to heed, I had been away from my practice for a week. It occurred to me that being injured is somewhere I do not choose to go nor do I like being forced by an injury to take a week off from my practice.
What about my essential labor? Going to the place of injury, well, it messes with my ego. In that place where I am injured, where I am asked to pause and to rest and to consider other aspects of my yoga practice, I am not the person I believe myself to be when I am practicing regularly. Attachment, I see, is real even when it concerns my attachment to practice. When Sri K. Pattabhi Jois was asked by one of his students about pain and injury and one's yoga practice, Jois wisely answered like any zen master or astute teacher interested in the growth of her students: "Pain is real." Enough said. And just as we are instructed to follow our breath in our yoga practice, to really understand that the asanas are merely a distraction from the breath--a trick, in other words, to get us caught in the ego--we understand, and sometimes the hard way, that we cannot ignore what is real. The path through injury is unique to each practitioner because our injuries, like our pain, hold an individual lesson for our unique benefit. It is not necessarily wise to follow the advice of another when face-to-face with our own brand of pain. My friend, Michael, in the end, had to face his own moment of surrender alone, to release his final breath, which would signal the end to his essential labor here. I imagine that at some level that release, that final letting go, is painfully bittersweet.
The other night, I watched a documentary about the tennis star and activist Billie Jean King who famously beat Bobby Riggs in a tennis match played in 1973 and billed as a battle of the sexes. For Riggs, that match was the game of a chauvanist; for King, the match stood for something so much larger than herself. For King, a win meant everything for the future of women who wanted to compete and be taken seriously, which meant the opportunity to earn equitable compensation, in tennis and other sports. In the final moments of the match, King talks about how she knew she had to finish the game; she could not think about having to go the distance and play five games. In that moment she said the most amazing thing. I thought it was amazing. She said that it is so hard to finish something. This from a champion, someone who trained both her body and her mind to compete and to win. This admission of King's made me think of Michael's recent passing, and the death of my father and many other friends and relatives who have had to release that final breath, who had to put an end to the product they labored on their entire lives by ultimately surrendering, and to something so unknown. How brave it is to finish, I think.
"Pain is real," counsels Pattabhi Jois. The remedy for me, once again, patience and listening more--endless journeys, too.
David Garrigues insists that injury is an opportunity for digging "deep into the heart of yoga," a quick reminder to me that there are eight limbs on this journey--perhaps not unlike the Bible's reference to "the many mansions of My Father's house." Garrigues is the founder of Ashtanga Yoga School of Philadelphia and one of the original disciples of Jois in the West. On a recent visit to his website, I discovered the following about ujjayi breath--the victorious breath at the heart of our yoga practice and that thread we are meant to learn to follow without distraction even when injured. An unattributed quote notes that ujjayi is "the noise of resurrection." Et voila! I think. There it is! The product of an essential labor: This is the noise of resurrection. My breath transformed by the rhythm of ujjayi. The breath of all souls transformed. Here is a place I recognize as home, and somewhere altogether new, another mansion in the house where I have never been.
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